Cracking music's mystery: how can we guess instinctively which note will come next?

Music is a mystery. How do mere vibrations of the air make sense to us? How do we “follow” musical sounds, often with such instinctive mastery that we can actually predict which note will come next? How do we find meaning in these sounds, which – unlike words – aren’t attached to anything out there in the world? And why are some pieces of music able to move us to tears?

For a sociologist, music derives meaning from its social setting. A funeral march feels sad because its rhythms and harmonies are interwoven with a sad occasion. A cultural historian focuses on how meaning attaches itself to music over time in a specific place. To a 19th-century German music-lover, German music sounded deep, Italian opera shallow.

In Comparing Notes, Adam Ockelford certainly mentions these things, but for him they are local features of music, worth only a detour. What really interests him is the bedrock beneath...